Design Observer: Any Baseball Is Beautiful

A pictorial ode to fallen soldiers from the Rawlings army.

… I’m not personally a baseball fan and I barely follow the sport, but I hear about this date every year as millions of fans look to the coming season. It is in this spirit of national reawakening that I stumbled upon the photographs of Don Hamerman, a photographer in Stamford, Connecticut. For the past few years, as he’s walked his dog at a local park, he’s picked up lost and forgotten baseballs. There are dozens of them now, all lovingly photographed.

We’ve run a number of recent essays on Design Observer about “things” — objects that are saved or collected or perhaps, on some level, simply fetishized. Most things, though, are made of something, or constructed by someone, or maybe even designed. Often, in their decomposition, they reveal themselves as having parts and materials, a mode of making, and perhaps even a soul. This is the territory of these photographs.

Hat tip to Deadspin.